Why You Should Meditate

Following his capture in the 1959 Tibetan uprising, Buddhist monk Palden Gyatso would endure 33 years of torture at the hands of the then nascent People’s Republic of China. The authorities were sure to vary his torment; he was beaten with clubs and nails, electrified, whipped, starved, and deprived of his teeth. In a subsequent interview following his escape, when asked what he had feared most, he responded, “That I may lose compassion for my torturers”.

There exists a threshold above which the benevolence of an individual seems almost bizarre. It is tempting to chalk up Gyatso’s character as an anomaly of human nature. However, his astonishing pronouncement was shared by many who endured a similar fate at the time. By no coincidence, all had dedicated a meaningful portion of their lives to meditation. Unfortunately, any invitation to the practice is met with reluctance and skepticism by much of contemporary society. This inertia is endemic especially to the secular West, which, having fought a protracted battle with Christian dogma over the centuries, is understandably not enthused to replace it with the Buddhist gods of Manjushri and Maitreya. The term ‘meditation’ seems now to be associated with patchouli-scented hippies, herbal tea, and chakra-aligning yoga.

The truth is, there is nothing one needs to presuppose about the nature of reality, metaphysical or otherwise, to understand why meditation makes sense. My goal is to demonstrate the soundness and profundity of this simple practice through basic reasoning and analogy. It may well be the most transformative insight one can experience (if you question whether this is possible, refer to the first paragraph). Often, proponents of meditation espouse its numerous health benefits, which include improved sleep, reduced stress, and lower heart rate (one doubts that Gyatso's constitution was simply a byproduct of logging more REM sleep than your average person). While these claims are noteworthy, you will find them to be entirely tangential to my thesis here.  

The form of meditation pertinent to this discussion is commonly referred to as ‘mindfulness meditation’. It entails the ostensibly straightforward practice of paying close attention to one’s present experience, from one moment to the next. Initially, students are advised to focus on their breath one sitting at a time. There is nothing especially significant about the breath as a device; it can be substituted for any other sensation. However, given it is something one always has with them, it provides a fitting start (over time, the practice incorporates all the various 'contents' of consciousness). In these early periods, the practitioner discovers a rather embarrassing inability to maintain attention for more than a sporadic moment. Every few seconds, almost invariably so, thoughts sneak up on the individual and pull them away. By the end of the session, no effort will have been sufficient to prevent from being steeped in contemplation and memory. It is this phase which sees the vast majority throw in the towel. This is analogous to quitting piano lessons after your first attempt.

Upon reflection at this early stage, what should be alarming is the endless power thoughts are demonstrated to have over us. In the words of one instructor:

You pay attention to the breath and the next second you have completely forgotten the project. It is analogous to dreaming; you’ve lost contact with who you are. All of a sudden, you’re having an argument with someone who’s not there, rehearsing some past conversation with your own voice. You’re in the middle of this conversation you’ve had with yourself 15 times in the last 24 hours, and it’s striking you as new every time. You are not impatient with yourself, nor bored, with an endless appetite to hear the next thing that comes over. This is psychotic on two levels. One, it presupposes a conversational structure that makes no sense. If you are the one to think the thought and also hear it, why did you need to think it in the first place? You are thinking to yourself as if you’re both speaker and audience. And second, you are helplessly carried away by it. It is pathological. The fact we think this is compatible with human sanity and basic wellbeing is simply because it is happening to everybody.

While frustration is natural, what’s important to understand is that meditation is a skill as any other. It cannot be developed without its fair share of irritation. Only with the requisite effort and time is the meditator able to marshal enough attention with enough consistency. The goal is not to stop yourself from thinking. There may certainly occur moments of unbroken attention that see no thoughts arising, but the purpose rather is to be impervious to them. In other words, a refusal to identify with the thoughts that surface in consciousness – to simply observe them as they appear and fall away. Gradually, the transitory and innocuous nature of thoughts become apparent. If left to their devices, they disperse and are no different to the sounds of breathing. It remains impossible to stay angry or frustrated for more than seconds at a time.

Thoughts are uniquely culpable for any negative experience. To demonstrate, recall the worst week of your life. The feeling of helplessness and dread. Every coming hour approached with trepidation. However, even during this time, it lies true to say that the nature of your experience isn’t constant dismay. It ebbs and flows. Consider one morning of this very week. Even in the worst of times, you do not wake up in a state of panic. It is not until that first thought strikes reminding you of all your troubles that anxiety takes hold. Thoughts serve as the conduit between external impetus and internal reaction. Either you identify with whatever gets sent over the transmission, prolonging your suffering, or you simply act as witness.  This is not an argument for inaction while the world around you is falling apart. For instance, regret is a powerful tool insofar as it allows one to identify reflect upon past missteps. Beyond that however, further rumination and guilt only detracts from your wellbeing.

The rare few who persist in this practice and foster the ability to notice thoughts as they arise – just as with any other sensation – begin to gain a perspective on consciousness itself. What is salient is that consciousness – the condition prior to the arising of any thoughts, sounds, sensations – is not congruent to the feeling of what it is like to be you. We view ourselves as a subject appropriating experience. Yet, this ‘self’ we feel we are – a homunculus located behind the eyes, directing awareness from one place to another – is itself another experience we can aim our attention towards.

The theory etched thus far now extends to investigate this concept of ‘self’. For any identifiable feeling or state of mind, there is an accompanying signature in consciousness. For instance, our awareness as to any state of excitement or nervousness is betrayed by fluttering sensations in the stomach. The light by which these sensations are seen is the very fact of consciousness. It follows then, that the feeling of ‘self’, if identifiable, must possess its own concomitant signature. And consciousness has to be the prior condition to this signature (if this is unconvincing, consider why you are unaware of yourself when asleep or unconscious). Just as with thoughts, provided the requisite concentration, this ‘self’ can be witnessed as another among the phenomena of consciousness. The very concept is an illusion. Once the practitioner has come to this realization, they have achieved the transcendent state of nirvana: an absence of suffering, desire, nor sense of self. There is only experience. This is not to say the ‘self’ disappears permanently. The illusion is always there but can be cut through with the requisite degree of attention.

It is probable many fundamental intuitions held about subjective experience are being tampered with here. Much of what has been stated may sound like castles in the air. It is important to clarify what is not being asserted. It would be untrue to stipulate you the individual do not exist, provided ‘you’ is in reference to a human being of certain physical and genetic attributes.

Setting aside an experiential inquiry into the nature of ‘self’, we can participate in a philosophical one. In one Buddhist manuscript, the Indo-Greek King Menander the First engages the monk Nagasena in a discussion about the nature of self, in what is known as the ‘Simile of the Chariot’. Nagasena asks the king whether the chariot is the same as its comprising parts – axle, yoke, body and so forth. If it is broken apart piece by piece, at what point does it fail to become a chariot? He suggests the chariot is simply a designation for a particular assembly of its various parts. In the same spirit, the ‘self’ is one such designation for a collection of physical and mental components.

Some two millennia after Nagasena had walked the earth, Scottish intellectual David Hume treaded similar ground:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could neither thinking nor feeling, nor seeing, nor loving, nor hating, ever return to my soul, ’tis the same thing as annihilation. If anyone, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him.

Pairing commendable introspection with conceptual precision, Hume finds no enduring principle of the ‘self’ beyond sensations and feelings. He declares it to be simply the continuity of sensory experience.

The veracity of his thesis can be demonstrated through some universally shared memories. The extent to which we’re aware of ourselves when transfixed in a thrilling movie is far from, say, when being reprimanded by our mother for misbehaving. In the latter instance, held hostage to embarrassment and awkwardness, we are made sharply aware of ourselves. Consider by extension the zany analogy of a voyeur who has positioned himself at the windowsill of a neighboring couple. A few minutes into this escapade, the sound of approaching footsteps is heard behind him. It would be safe to assume in that moment, he is more aware of himself than he has ever been of any lived experience. The moral here is that the feeling of ‘self’ is simply a function of experience. Some such experiences heighten our perception of ourselves, such as prolonged eye-contact with strangers, or being caught in scandalous acts (for a captivating yet scholarly read, see ‘The Ego Tunnel’ by Thomas Metzinger).

The first ever person to discover bodybuilding must have attracted a few bemused stares from his local folk. Picture a man repeatedly picking up and putting down objects and contorting his muscles in peculiar ways with the only tangible appearing to be sweat and occasional injury. In the same vein, reason and analogy, however scrupulous, will fail the demands of most in a domain where the evidence is subjectively experienced. Short of getting someone to meditate, it is easy to dismiss the assertions here as conjecture.  If nothing else, what we must grant is that as with anything else, if one is to truly understand their mind, they should sit down and observe it.